Source: City I&T Grand Challenge website
The City I&T Grand Challenge provides an exceptional platform for people from all walks of life to put forward innovative ideas to tackle imminent livelihood challenges facing Hong Kong and steer the city forward together.
Close to 300 teachers from close to 190 primary and secondary schools participated in the Design Thinking workshop organised by MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node in April 2021, which were specially tailored for the Grand Challenge. The objective of the workshop is to equip teachers with the skills and knowledge, so they can coach their students to derive innovative I&T solutions of the Grand Challenge. Throughout the 3-hour intensive virtual workshop, teachers learnt the fundamentals of Design Thinking, how to cultivate “out-of-the-box” thinking and breakout from conventional mindset and understood the challenges students might encountered in the ideation process via experiential learning.
The workshop highlighted the following areas with a focus on “Inspire, Ignite Innovative Thinking and Experiential Learning”,
a) What Design Thinking is and how Design Thinking helps formulating solutions
b) Tools of Design Thinking
c) Case studies (local and worldwide) related to the theme / problem statements
d) Experiential learning on Design Thinking and application
e) E-teaching and E-learning skills and application
Participated teachers also got the valuable opportunity to change their roles from “teachers to students”, and gone through the different stages of Design Thinking (i.e. Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) to practise the process and tools of Design Thinking and exchange their views in virtual breakout rooms. With the guidance of experienced facilitators, teachers have come up with creative and innovative solutions for the persona derived from the problem statements of the Grand Challenge.
To conclude, the Train-the-Trainers Workshop not only equipped teachers with the skills and knowledge to guide and facilitate their students for the Grand Challenge, but also empowered them to be the next great innovators themselves to embark on the Grand Challenge alongside their students to transform the future of Hong Kong.
Click the link below to watch the highlights of the Workshop and kick start your innovation journey! Be an Innovator!
